How Does RSS Podcasting Stay Competitive in Video World

All right, we're live.

Todd and Rob in the afternoon.

Hey, afternoon delight with Todd and Rob. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. And here we are for another new media show. Welcome everyone. Rob, how you doing?

I'm doing all right in this late afternoon. Um, and if you're on the East Coast, we're at 8 PM now. Uh, and we will be at 8 PM every Wednesday for, uh, for some period of time here, Todd.

No, May 11th.

May 11th. Okay. All right. Terrific. Well, it's been quite an eventful week in the podcasting space.

Well, in certain circles, in the, in the insider circles, it's been invented. Otherwise it's, you know, I don't know if it's been that eventful, but it's—

well, yeah. On an external basis, it's probably not that eventful, but inside the industry, there's a lot of, I guess, angst and concerns about the direction. And it's really coming out of some of the research that's been coming out. And hopefully we can cover that a little bit today.

Yeah, absolutely. We've got on tap today, we're going to talk about the infinite dial. We're gonna talk a little bit about HLS. Many of you know what the hell is HLS, right? Um, and you know, and then whatever topics else Rob has dug up in the, uh, in the dock here. But do you want to start by digging into the, the Infinite Dial? Is that where we want to begin? Yes.

Um, do you want to bring it up on the screen or is that possible?

Yeah, let me go full screen here with this because it's— do we do that? And let me go here, let me get it up at least, and I can figure out how to go full screen. Okay, so let's see here. There's no like play button, is there? All right, well, so And of course, Infinite Dial's been, of course they did this before podcasting started. So it's been out 20+ years, I think. But the part that we wanna look at is the podcasting angle. And we don't need to go over the overview, but we'll say that they conducted a nationwide survey of 5,020 12 and older. 4,006 were telephone surveys and 4,014 were online surveys. Survey offered in both English and Spanish and data weighed to a national 12+ US population figure. So let's look at this first slide. This is the one that hasn't changed very much. 91% of people have smartphones. I think we all kind of know— knew that.

It's not going up much, is it, anymore?

No.

It's kind of peaked. And I know— $262 million estimated, it says.

Yeah. And I don't think you can see this screen, Rob, so I apologize.

No, I can't. I popped it up on my own screen so I can see the deck. As long as you tell me which slide you're on.

Yeah. So 27% on smartwatch ownership, 78 million. Uh, yeah, these numbers just incrementally barely going up. Headphone ownership, 170 million, which to me it seems a little low. Seems like everyone has a set of headphones. I guess it's Bluetooth enabled. Um, seems like everyone has a smartphone would have one. Of course, smart TVs are now in 3/4 of American homes, and I just bought a brand new smart TV. Or my apartment. As I mentioned to you before we started the show, I moved to a little bigger apartment and the bedroom did not have a TV, so I went and bought a TV. But smart speaker is at 101 million, up 1%. Audio listening through smart speakers actually has— well, it's went up in the last month but down in the last week. Still very, very small, 22%. Mm-hmm. So social media, this should be interesting. 86%, big jump.

Let's kind of summarize what we just saw with the whole devices stuff. And I think what we've really seen here is kind of a— we've reached kind of a saturation point of sorts, or very close, right?

Yeah, for sure.

Of all of these devices and platforms. And, you know, where do we go from here? Is it just going to go up a point or two now and then? And I saw in a few of these that they actually went down and then up by a point over the last couple of years. But I guess the smartphone or the smart TV ownership was the one that grew the most. It went from 72% to 75%, and I know all 3 of the TVs that I have in my home are all smart TVs. And if you don't have a smart TV, it's really easy to just get like a Roku stick or something like that and instantly it's a smart TV.

Yeah, and that's why it's, to me, it's kind of just like headphones. Everyone's probably got a stick now if they have an internet connection. Social media usage, that's the biggest jump, 86% to 248 million. And yeah, social media reached 86% of folks. So I believe that completely. But here's the breakdown, the big one, social media brand awareness. Facebook is still number one, Instagram Facebook at 94, Instagram at 91, TikTok at 90, very, very high. Snapchat, which I, people still use Snapchat, uh, 87%. Twitter at 85, Pinterest at 81, LinkedIn, which is a big spam haven, 77%.

Yeah, I've seen, um, some surveys point out that Snapchat's actually bigger than TikTok. So I think it depends on the study. And then also, I think it's interesting that 86% of Americans are using social media, where we saw on the smartphone adoption, it was 91%, I guess. So there's a percent, 5% of Americans are not using social media if they have a smartphone, is kind of what that tells me.

So here's interesting is, uh, Truth Social, 39%, probably made up mostly of conservatives, and then Bluesky at 23%, mostly made up of liberals, I'm going to assume. So kind of—

I think that's a reasonable assumption. Yeah. And it's an interesting, um, kind of separation there in adoption. But I, I also noticed that the the split around, and I believe this is in the numbers too, the split around X, formerly Twitter, still leans, I thought it leaned more heavily towards the Democrats just by a couple of points.

Is that in this later?

I believe so, yeah.

Yeah, so we'll get down to it. 85% on X, Twitter. Mastodon, 7%. You know, I'm one of those 7%. Let's see your social media brand usage. Uh, currently use social media, 66 on Facebook, 48 on Instagram, 34 on TikTok.

So what's the real difference between social media brand usage And brand— oh, brand awareness. That's not usage.

It says social—

it says that's just being a— being familiar with the, the name.

It says social media brand usage. That's in 2017.

No, I'm talking about the one above it that said social media brand awareness.

Oh yeah, awareness. Yeah, yeah, that's not useful usage. Yeah, you're right.

Right, right. So really, if you look at the social media brand usage—

much lower—

that's, that's the more significant number there.

Yeah, Twitter's 22%, Facebook 66%, LinkedIn 29%. I find it hard to believe people are using LinkedIn more than Twitter, but I guess, you know, as much spam as I get on LinkedIn, that's probably the truth. Uh, Bluesky 5%, Truth Social 3%, Mastodon 1%. Very low numbers. Mm-hmm. What's the next one here?

But what's different there is awareness doesn't match with usage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, on those, because, well, I know, yeah, I know a lot of people on Facebook that have never posted. Which is kind of weird.

They just kind of lurk.

Yeah, you know, they've been there for, you know, last post is, you know, 2023, you know. So some people are on there, but the next one is on the split, you know, shows the climb and decline. But if you look at Facebook, they went from From 2023, from 61% to 66%. Is there any big winners or losers? Yeah, Twitter dropped from 27% to 22%. They came a little back from 24%.

Yeah, so yeah, they're back, back to growing again.

Yeah, yeah, they're back to growing again.

So let's go into the next one here, and it looks like Snapchat's about the same size. Uh, as X, Twitter.

Yeah, I just— this— is it mostly kids on Snapchat?

I think so.

Yeah, or young adults.

Yeah, yeah.

So X, Twitter usage by political affiliation. Yeah, here's the real breakdown. And '23, 34% were using it, 22% in '25, independents 28, 21, Republicans 20 to 25. So it was a growth of Republicans, drop of Democrats, and independents drop. So this kind of makes sense.

Well, the independents stayed the same from '24 to '25.

Yeah, they didn't change comparing '23.

And, and the Democrats actually went up.

Yeah, they came back.

Yeah, well, incrementally.

Yeah, incrementally.

Very small.

So yeah, these are the deltas between— excuse me— purely Democrats and Republicans. 69, 68.

It's a blue line.

69 is the Democrats, so For those of you listening, X2225, of course, that's Blue Sky. Oh, wow. Definitely 9% Democrats, 1% Republicans. True Social, 2% Democrats, 7% Republicans. Probably the lurkers, you know, that are over there trying to see what's going on, but maybe not participating.

Yeah, that's interesting.

But if you look at brand used most often by age, I'm actually kind of shocked that the— actually not. If you look at, uh, 12 to 34, 23 Facebook, 26 Instagram, 26% TikTok.

It's pretty evenly split.

11% Snapchat. And I'm looking on slide 21, 35-54, so 50%.

I don't see a number.

Okay, so social media brand used most often by age, 50% on, uh, 35 to 54 on Facebook, 20%. So basically Facebook as people get older, Facebook dominates and then the other services shrink.

Yeah, but the— I— oh, I guess the 12+, it's still— oh yeah, still the biggest platform. It's just the younger demo, that 12 to 34, is what it really—

yeah, I'm looking at the delta between— yeah, the age groups. So I guess I'm not— I guess I'm not surprised.

And then the Snapchat usage is pretty high between the ages of 12 and 34 too. Let's see.

Yeah, 11%. Then it drops dramatically. 35 to 54, 2%. 55 plus, 1%. I think I have a Snapchat account, but I don't think I've been on there.

Yeah, I do too.

Been on there in years.

Yeah, I haven't been on there in a long time. Yeah. Yeah, though I was thinking I probably should, but I don't, I don't know if it's in, in the proper demo for me.

And this is an interesting one. This talks about the next slide, talks about so should social media be banned in the U.S. for anyone under 16? Well, I count me in on this. 12 plus, because just because of the craziness out there, um, maybe not 16, maybe 14, but 12+ 48% says yes, it should be banned for anyone under 16. Men are less inclined to think it should be banned for under 16 than women, 46 to 51. And Republicans are much stronger, 58 to 45, thinking it should be banned for anyone under 16. I tell you, I honestly think things would go better in schools if they didn't have access to social media. I think this is all a moot point. It's a, it's a question that will never— they'll never ban. No, they won't.

They'll never be sure why they're even asking the question.

Yeah, they'll never ban that. But again, almost half Americans support banning social media for those under 16. So here's the part I don't Here's the part we want to look at the most. I guess for that next session, it just shows you that Snapchat is still relevant. X has grown some, and there's definitely a split between Republicans and Democrats.

Which one are you looking at?

I moved ahead. I'm just talking about the summary, online audio. Oh, okay.

Yeah, I didn't know where Where you were?

Well, I just was summarizing the last section. Oh, so monthly online audio listening has grown to 79% at 228 million. That's a pretty good— that's a 3% bump. But that's not podcast listening. No, that's online audio listening.

That's streaming and podcasting.

It's anything, any type of audio listening. Online audio listening to AM/FM radio stations online and/or listening to streams, audio content available only on the internet, right? But they don't say—

yeah, where specifically is the growth is the question.

Well, I guess we'll find out, hopefully. Yeah, we will. Monthly online listening By age group, you look at that 12 to 34, 90%. 35 to 34, 85, 87. What's interesting is the 55-plus group had a huge jump by 11%. Huge jump.

They're shifting from, from traditional broadcast.

So that tells you that They're finally, maybe because they have to, you know, they've had to adapt is the reason why they've jumped. I don't know, maybe they'll come up with a reasoning why that segment has jumped.

Well, also, Todd, keep in mind that the most popular in the past age demo for podcasts were those that are in that middle demographic, that 35 to 54. Yeah. Is historically where the largest numbers of podcast listeners have been.

But here we are 20 years later.

Yeah, so those people have maybe aged into that 55+.

That's probably true. That's probably driving it, but it's a big increase year over year. Online audio. It's the biggest. Yeah, online audio now reaches 79% or 228 million people listen monthly. Let's go and switch that to weekly online audio listening. Again, 210 million, 70 to 73. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Now let's talk about online audio brand awareness. Which listening platforms, right? Spotify 87, Pandora 84. Wow, that blows me away. 77 Apple Music. Yeah, you never hear anything about Pandora.

No, never.

Amazon Music, 77. YouTube Music, 77. Again, they're talking about brand awareness, aware of online audio brands. They've been around long enough, people should be aware. iHeart 76, SoundCloud 43, NPR 125, Odyssey 16, and TuneIn Radio 14. So interesting decline. Online audio brands listened to in the last month. Spotify is again number 1, 35%. YouTube Music, 28%. Pandora, 17%. Apple Music, 16%.

Yeah, I think it's interesting that the Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and iHeart are all about the same.

Yeah, only difference too is listening in the last month, iHeart is at 9%. Um, let's break this out by age groups, and this is telling. If we look at the age brackets, 12 to 34, Spotify's at 47%, but if you go to 55+, Spotify's at 17%, whereas 12 to 34 at 19% on YouTube Music and 55+ 23. Wow, that's interesting. Yeah, so, and I think it's true because Spotify to me is always trended really young. There's a dividing line when we talk— when I talk to my team, everyone that is in that 12 to 34 bracket are on— listen to Spotify for music. Yeah, always on Spotify. Yeah, and then everyone that's older, they're kind of like, yeah, whatever. You know, if you're, you know, I listen to some Latin music once in a while, and if I want to listen to Latin music, I go to Spotify because they got better playlists. So, but if I'm looking for a My Music playlist, I use Apple Music. So I guess it depends on, on where, or, you know, at least for me, it's based upon what genre of music I wanna listen to, so.

Well, I think it's interesting. I think the most interesting thing on here that kind of surprises me is the consistent percentage of usage of YouTube Music. I'm a little surprised at this. Even the 12 to 34 at 19%. And the 34 to 40, uh, to 54, or the 35 to 54 is 22%, and the 55 plus is actually the top of the chart.

Do you think they get mixed up in talking about YouTube? Because I, I watch, I, every once in a while I'll get on a kick and there'll be some music on YouTube like a music video, and it'll start showing up in my playlist. So I wonder if people confuse— I would find that— I find that number pretty shocking that—

I know, that's why it really, really jumped out at me. I didn't think that the YouTube Music platform would be that popular with the 55+. I just, I didn't make that connection. I, I haven't used—

the only reason I've opened YouTube Music recently is to look at a podcast listing. That's the only reason. Yeah, so, so I think you're right, Todd.

I think there is some brand confusion between YouTube Music and YouTube.

Yeah, I'm guessing, you know, that's a hypothesis here. All right, keep clicking the wrong button. All right, next slide. Audiobook listening, it's stayed flat, 23-35%. 24, 38%. 2025 going down. Yeah, yeah. And I know some people listen to audiobooks, but I have never listened. I can't listen to an audiobook. To me, it's, uh, I don't know. I, I, I can't. Yeah, but again, I think some people love it, and but still it shows the percentage at about 104 million. Yeah. All right, the section we've been waiting for— podcasting incrementally up. Yeah, 84 to 85, right? So just, you know, I think, uh, Todd, do you think we're ever gonna—

we're gonna get much above 85? Well, if you think about that first slide we saw, it was 91, right?

Aware of podcasting. This is aware. That's—

wasn't that smartphone adoption?

At the beginning it was— at the beginning it was about how many people listen to or aware of audio. That was pretty high. I'd have to go back to that slide, but, but still, you know, it— so we went from 79, 83, 84, 85. At least it's not going backwards. You know, that's—

well, that's just a brand familiarity, right? Right.

Are—

have been fairly recently talking about how, you know, like it always is talked about, it's time to rename the industry to netcast or to VODcast. At least we haven't heard too much of that recently, thank goodness. Well, I think, you know, I think this this nails the coffin, right? That it's a dead topic. Podcasting, I think the question is, does the term podcast apply to video now? And I would say that's probably a question that needs to be asked.

Yeah, I'll see if they get into it here at all, but Sounds Profitable will probably get into that question more. And also Coleman Insights is gonna be doing something at Podiast Movement. Along with Steve Goldstein. Ever listened to a podcast? This is a big jump, 70%, 67 to 70. So we've seen example 22, 62, 23, 64, 24, 67, 25, 70. And I just, you know, I wonder if this, and I'm seeing the remnants of the next slide. I'm just wondering if the reason they've said that is The following service most used often to listen to a podcast. This blows me away. I just— and this doesn't add up to 100%. YouTube 33%, Spotify 26%, Apple Podcasts 14%. Hmm.

Well, there's a bunch of other platforms that people use, right? Yeah.

Where's the rest of the list? Um, Pocket Casts. And yeah, but service most often used, I just, I just don't, you know, between Spotify and Apple Podcasts, that just doesn't add up from anything we see. It just does not add up. The YouTube number is whatever the YouTube number is, but The Spotify Apple Podcast one has got me so confused because we just don't see that, that split. We still, uh, of between Apple and Spotify, Apple still dominates.

Well, I think we're talking about two different things here. Um, this, this slide doesn't address the question of how much is being consumed. Yeah, that's true.

Of podcasts, right?

This is only, I mean, a person could open one of these apps once and be counted in this and actually never actually clicked on something.

Well, it says percent of US weekly podcast listeners 13+ use each service most often for podcasts. So they could have been, oh, could have been more than one person answering this question because, oh, I use YouTube and Spotify. Yeah, right. Interesting.

Yeah.

Ever consumed a podcast? Total population listen to podcast 70, 51 watch the podcast. Oh yes, well, that's a video.

Yeah.

And then 73 consumed a podcast. Well, I don't know what's the difference there.

I, I think that was a silly question to ask. Consumed? I think you need to have clear listened and watched. I don't think that there's a distinction between consumed, do you? That's a combination.

So 70/51. Yeah, but mathematically that doesn't make any sense to me. I think, yeah, you know, again, the perception of the public that podcasting is anything with the person holding a microphone or have a microphone in front of them.

Does that mean 73% have consumed an audio— or video— and/or a video? Yeah, I think so.

That's my speculation here. I'd have to listen to their telecast or whatever they did.

So I guess that number could match up with some earlier data that they have. Around, you know, what percentage of the population has actually, you know, listened to a podcast in the last month or something like that. Yeah.

Um, that's ever though.

It's okay.

So here's an interesting— ever consumed a podcast. So what they did is they brought that number in and it says 73 at 210 million, but they have a 70% reported watching but not listening. Huh? Reported watching but not listening. Oh, was 3%. That's where it is. Reported watching but not listening.

Well, that's a little unclear there. Um, is it— well, Is it 70% audio? Let me go back to the—

so 73% consumed a podcast, but then this new number is 3% reported watching but not listening. How do you watch and not listen?

Well, this is where you have to be clear in what you're asking someone. Yeah, I don't either.

They made a note at the bottom. It says 2025, listen to and/or watch the podcast. Reported watch. So I guess if you watch, you are listening.

Well, you can start playing a video and put the phone in your pocket. And just listen to the audio.

They said reported watching but not listen. I, I don't get it. I— we're gonna have to go back and listen to their— they're definitely going to have something specific to say about this slide. I think we're going to have to go in and listen to the audio of the actual presentation to understand what they did there. I'm assuming—

so which one are you questioning, or what's your question? Well, I'm assuming— so before On what slide are you talking about? You talking about—

I haven't ever consumed a podcast. Yeah, okay, okay. Ever listened to or watched a podcast. So 70% would be that number, but say they must have had some additional question. Reported watching but not listening. Again, I don't get it. So let's go to the next slide. There's some Definitely confusion there on my part.

Yeah, and then it doesn't really match up with— well, I guess it does match up with the earlier slide where we're at 73%, but the question is, if 51% watched a podcast in the prior bar and 70% listened, so I don't understand where the—

Go to the next slide. Where's the delta there?

It's not 3%.

Well, go to the next slide and you may well be confused even more. Listened and watched a podcast, 48%. Listened to and watched a podcast. So that means you've listened to and/or watched. Okay. Next slide, it says, ever listened to a podcast but never watched? Oh, only 22%. Have only ever listened to a podcast but not watched. And then 27% never listened to or watched a podcast. Okay, so that's a percentage that have never listened to or watched a podcast, 27%. But here's again, this 3% number, ever watched a podcast but never listened, 3%. So that means that people are watching but not listening. That is so bizarre. I don't— who would do that?

Well, there is a phenomenon around— Closed captions? Closed captions scenarios, yeah. But I can't imagine that would be such a big chunk of consumption here. I mean, unless they're tracking Shorts or something like that. I don't know of that many podcasts that have captions on them, but on the video side.

Well, YouTube automatically includes it. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah. And it does. And it is on the Shorts as well. Actually, sometimes there's even competing captions.

So if we move to the next slide, percent listened to or watched a podcast in the last month, 47 to 48. But again, if we— Where are you now?

Oh, monthly podcast consumption? Yeah. Is that where you're at?

Yeah. Okay.

Next. Yeah.

So there again, they split it. Reported watched but not listened is 7%. Of that total. We're missing something here in this, you know, 47 to 48 that listened to or watched a podcast in the last month.

And then I took away from this that there's just a slight increase in audio consumption is what I took away from this, 1%, and then the rest of the growth was the 48 to 55. Yeah, I'm—

and that was on the video. But again, reported watching but not listening is 7% of that 48 to 55. They're—

I hate to say, but their breakouts here are not clear. Very confusing.

All right, let's, let's move to the next one here. Podcasts achieves new heights. 55% of Americans now consume podcasts. Okay, let's go to the next one. Monthly podcast consumption: 48% listen, 37% watch, 55% consumed. So basically, you've— there are people that have done audio and video. Monthly podcast consumption between men and women. Again, they reported watch and not listen is throwing a monkey wrench in this thing. 48 to 51, 45 to 55, and then if you include this reported watching but not listening, it's 48 to 57, which is a massive jump, or both, 45 to 52. I'm gonna have to go back and listen to the study to figure out where this little delta mark is.

Well, and also, you know, that consumed a podcast should be a listing of how many people just listen to a podcast and how many people maybe listen to an audio and video version of a podcast as a breakout. And I don't think they're being clear enough here on what's going on here. I think what they need to have is a breakout of how many people alternate between listening and watching a podcast and how many people listen to a podcast and then also occasionally watch a podcast.

Yeah, my confusion is where they say reported watching but not listening. That not listening has got me confused. This is where my confusion factor is.

Well, that's, I think they're assuming if you're watching, that's not listening. So I think is what that is. Okay. Well, and that's not being clear either.

Yeah, I watch and listen.

I know, but then you have to classify that completely different, right? Somehow you got to separate the audio only consumption.

Yeah, they should have said that. The video only consumption.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, so anyway, we're growing one way or the other.

Something is growing anyway, and it looks like it's the, it's the watching side. Yeah, where the growth is. It is.

So next slide is percent listen to or watch a podcast the last month, 12 to 34. Again, that split 58-64 actually dropped on that side. It went from 59 to 58. So that age group is watching more than listening, and I think That makes sense. 35 to 54 went from 55— well, stayed the same, 55, 55. And then that age group is listening or watching more, apparently.

And it also looks like the younger generation, the 12 to 34, is listening less.

Yeah, that's what I said. Yeah. And then 55 plus went from 27 to 33, and if you include video, 38. Yeah, I guess we're just going to say include video because I think that's the easiest way. Monthly podcast consumption Democrats is 45 to 46 up to 53, then 50 up to 56.

So, Todd, I think it's funny, you know, both of us have been looking at these studies for years now. Many years now. I think this is the first year, I don't know if you saw it last year or not, where they felt the need to incorporate political sides in the survey. Yeah.

And I understand why they've done that.

Well, I understand why too, but it is a sign of the times, right? It's a sign of the cultural shift that's happened that I don't think is very positive. So I think it's a It's a pretty negative thing to focus on, in my opinion.

But well, if people are looking for information on what type of content to make, you know, there's— I guess everything—

and this is my point— everything is being seen through the lens of politics now. Yeah. And it's, and it's, and it's dividing us. So let's go into weekly— everything—

let's go into weekly podcast consumption. Percent listen to or watch a podcast in the last week. Went from 34 to 35, if you include video, 40%, which is a massive jump. Yeah. All right, next slide. Percent listener watch a podcast in the last week. Listen to a podcast, 35. Watch a podcast, 26. Consume a podcast, 40. So basically, I think that 40 number is, did you— I— yes, I listened and I watched. I'm just gonna— yeah, I'm just gonna assume that. So anyway, I don't know why they—

I don't know why they just don't say that. Yeah, because it's an—

it's an audio term.

It's assumed is a confusing term.

Here's the reason why, Rob. This is the Infinite Dial, an audio, you know, audio-centric report. And, you know, we don't want to talk about— we don't want to call video video. So maybe that's why they—

Well, they, they focus pretty heavily on, on the video side here, but they just call it watched. Right, watched.

So next slide is in-car media. This should be interesting. Have automotive phone integration systems and have a auto— okay, question is, do you have a system in your primary vehicle that has phone integration? Apple CarPlay, 28. Android Auto, 19. Have either system, 40. My car has both Android Audio and Apple CarPlay.

My car doesn't have either one. That's right.

Yeah.

But it does have Apple capability in it. Yeah. It's just not CarPlay, right?

So 40% of vehicles now have phone integration. I think we can understand that will continue to grow. Use automotive phone integration systems in vehicle. Apple CarPlay 22%. In other words, are you using your phone? Android Auto 13%. That's still pretty small numbers, isn't it, Todd?

Yeah, yeah. It's surprising how long it's taken for—

Yeah, I would have thought it would have grown faster. Yeah.

Let's see here.

This, I don't— I, this, this next one, audio sources currently used in car. Now, if you think about this, now, if you, if you deduct, okay, so we go back to the previous slide or the previous couple slides where, you know, AM/FM. So let's, okay, let me go up here. Let me go back. So Apple CarPlay was 28 and 19. Okay, so let's assume your vehicle has Apple CarPlay or Android, so no, have either system, 40%. Now let's go to this slide here that talks about audio sources in car. And if we, if we take the AM/FM radio and we deduct 40% from that 74, so if you assume that you have a car that is internet-ready, Apple CarPlay, Android, you're probably not gonna listen to AM/FM that much. So, right, but they say currently use audio source in primary car, so they are using it. AM/FM 74, online audio 55, podcast 31, SiriusXM 24, CDs, 24%. Really? Apple CarPlay, 22%. MP3 digital audio files, 14%. Android Auto, 13%.

It doesn't say how much they're being used.

Well, let's see if they get into that. Okay. Audio sources currently used in cars. And if we look at the comparison, what's this? Oh, 18 to 34, of course, 54%. 35 to 54 is 78%. Age 55 and above is 84% for AM/FM radio. Whereas podcast, 18 to 34 is 48%. 35 to 54 is 40, and 13% is 55+. I, I, I just— I, I— there's one station, and when I'm in my vehicle, there's one station that— there's a lot of older cars, Todd.

Yeah, but I think that's, that's what's going on here. Or cars that aren't—

don't have that full capability. Maybe. I don't know. It just blows me away that AM/FM's that high. Observations: podcast consumption is at an all-time high. Audio consumption for podcasts continues to grow, but podcasts using video are attracting more podcast consumers to the medium, and online audio adoption is at an all-time high. That's the end. Let's look at the next slide. Another observation, car audio is becoming increasingly digital. Social media use continues to expand and strong public support for social media regulation are the observations of this report. Podcast consumption, of course, is at an all-time high. Is this— again, I go back to this AM/FM thing, and I look at, look at the age group 18 to 34, which are my— that's my kids. Yeah, I've been in every one of their vehicles, and they are not, they are not listening to AM/FM radio.

Yeah, it's almost the same number. I mean, it's off by 6 percentage points with that age group utilizing podcasts in the car too.

Yeah, because that far off from that. Yeah, online audio, 82% of 18 to 34. But that could be Spotify.

I mean, there's— yeah, there's a lot of crossover between these two things actually, between online audio and podcasts.

And if you look at Sirius— my car has Sirius, and actually I canceled Sirius because it was just crazy money. They wanted like $300 for a month or something like that. And wow, it was— I mean, for a month— I mean, not for a month, for a year. And I thought, oh, you're insane. No way. So I canceled. And then with like 10 days, I said, I'll come back for, you know, like $70 a month or something like that. And I, and I said, okay, I'll come back for $70— not $70, but $70 a year. And, um, I, uh, I haven't listened to any SiriusXM since I renewed, so it was kind of a wasted amount of money.

The, the light item on here that always— and it's been in here for years— but always throws up a red flag for me on the overall numbers, uh, it's the categorization of MP3 digital audio files. Yeah, who does that?

Is that— does that mean I'm playing MP3s on my phone? Yeah, well, from my own library, I guess it could be. Or am I carrying a USB stick out to the car and sticking it in and playing? I mean, who's—

who and where would that be classified as a source for that? Is it just personal collections? Is that what that is?

Well, you know, there's been such a, you know, Apple really screwed the pooch on this. And, you know, in, in making the, um, they wanted you to, you know, sync your library and then pay to access your library or whatever happened years ago. And I basically double-barreled them. I'm like, screw you, I still have my entire collection. But I'll be honest with you, I can't remember the last time I actually queued up that library. So they even converted me because I've got Apple Music that is— I pay every month for. And there's a playlist, you know, I guess if I wanted to reduce that, but they bundled everything, so they made it so convenient to get music on demand.

I'm just going to say everything has shifted to streaming. That's why I'm, I'm surprised. Now granted, there's a lot of people that I guess over the years has downloaded and purchased a bunch of MP3s.

I, I had 45,000 audio files from all my albums that I had because I digitized all my albums. That was like a 2-year project. Got it.

So you— what platform do you play those from now?

I don't. They're just on a hard drive.

So how would you play them into the car? I guess you'd have to—

I'd have to— I don't know.

Are people storing these up in the— up in like Google Cloud or something like that? I doubt it. And playing them off of their phones?

I Again, I used to use— it's been years since I actually played. There's a lot of people doing it.

It's like, you know, for 18 to 34 group, it's 19%. Well, I either—

they're ripping MP3s and I don't know how they're playing them. It just doesn't make sense to me because with all— with Spotify and Apple Podcasts and all these other things that are—

or Apple Music that are readily available Oh, Todd, did you see, did you see the news that, uh, I guess Napster is going to come back?

Well, it's under a new name, not same features for sure.

Oh, it's, yeah, it's, it's the same name, but it's coming back as a different product, right? Yeah. Okay.

Good luck with that.

It was purchased for what, $207 million or something like that?

So overall, podcasting is good and video is is growing too, which I guess isn't really news to us too much. No, but it's, you know, when the numbers go negative though, that's when to watch out. Again, the people are still listening to content, and this is what creators need to understand is they're still here. And we've had some other evidence recently that the audio has been it is still doing very well, as opposed, you know, video is still climbing, but audio is still doing good.

Yeah, on the monthly podcast consumption percentage, the breakdown between men and women, I think may be the sign of where the growth is really coming from. It's coming from the audio consumption is coming from men. The growth of audio consumption because women, it's kind of plateaued. I'm backing up here. So men's audio consumption went from 48% in 2024 to 51% in 2025.

And if you include video, 57%. Right, right. And audio is 45-45 with the ladies, right? Well, do you think that, uh, Rogan bro factor is part of that? I don't know.

Well, well, men have always been disproportionately larger consumers of podcasts, um, On that, it's just that that lead has been kind of, or that separation has been fairly significant in the past. It's pretty narrow. It stayed about—

Go ahead.

Well, back in 2023, the difference in monthly consumption was what, 7%?

Yeah, it's been hovering between, and then it narrowed in '24 to 3%. Right. It's hovered between like historically like 5% different, 5 to 6%.

But now it's separated quite a bit. It's, it's only 45% for women and it's 51.

And I think by U.S. population there's more women than men. Yeah, I think, which, which makes it even more disproportionately off.

Yeah.

Well, the reason is women live longer, largely because of men. Yeah, we— right, nursing homes are full of ladies, not full of guys.

So my dad is in that same situation. He understands quite clearly. I see it all the time when I go see him.

Yeah, when you go there, what do you think that— what do you think the delta is, Rob, that you see in a nursing home? I, I know when my grandparents were in there, he's just—

He's in a— yeah, he's not in a nursing home, but he's in, you know, he's like in a retirement kind of—

kind of a—

it's an independent living thing for seniors. But I mean, on just on his floor in his complex, I think there's like maybe 20 apartment units or something like that. I think like 17 or 18 of them are women. And there's only a couple of guys in the whole complex. Is there?

All the, all the men are dead at that age?

Well, I mean, yeah, you could probably make a fairly accurate generalization on that. Yeah, they die younger. Yeah, right.

So, hmm, well It's— I guess that's not surprising on the men-women split, but proportionately— and again, I don't know what the difference is, uh, globally.

I mean, yeah, the actual population, right? Yeah, I'd like to know what, what these same numbers are on a, on a global scale, but it's hard to do survey like that.

Yeah, for sure. All right, let's, uh— anyway, that's Infinite Dial. If you didn't already attend their webinar. And, um, of course, the Infinite Dial is done by Edison Research, edisonresearch.com. So where credit is credit is due.

Yeah, if you want to go get the, the PDF file, it's, uh, it's right off of their website, so you should be able to download it. That's what we were just showing on the screen.

So yeah, so So, uh, Rob, uh, what do you, what do you think my little fancy snazzy background here looks like? I've got, uh, neon.

I think we, uh, accidentally aligned in our, uh, color selection.

Oh yeah, the new ChatGPT image generator is fantastic. It's definitely a lot better.

It, Grok 3 is outstanding too. I was able to bring back and colorize some old black and white pictures of me playing college basketball.

I was, I was so sick of the DALL-E 3. I don't know.

Oh, it was horrible to work with.

Oh yeah. So I'm wondering what the API is. So I haven't run an API call since they upgraded. I hope they updated everything, but the API call to the image generation was even generations behind DALL·E 3. So we'll see what they've done here.

But anyway, yeah, I have been playing around with that and I'm learning that you really have to be, you have to use very specific language in the prompt to be able to have it generate what you want. And I found myself playing around with the prompt quite a bit, trying to use the right words and Well, describe what I want.

I got a pretty good, um, I can, uh, yeah, maybe I can— let me do it.

Let me show you something because that, that image behind you is really good quality image.

Yeah, so let me show you what— let me share my screen on Zoom.

I don't know that I'll be able to see it.

Yeah, you should be able to see it on Zoom. Hang on here. Oh, sure, sure, I got the right— yeah, so, um, can you see the screen? Oh man, I just screwed it up for the, the watchers. Let me bring this— yeah, I totally jacked it up. Let me stop sharing screen here in Zoom. Oh my God. Stop share. Bring the camera back. That wasn't good. All I can say is the— I asked it to— because you talked a little bit about what we're going to talk about. I said create a YouTube thumbnail for episode 623. We'll be covering HLS streaming and the 2025 Infinite DAO report. And it created me with perfect English. One side says HLS streaming video, the other side says the 2025 Infinite Dial with a circle with percentage marks, and then underneath Episode 623. So it created the absolute best thumbnail art for YouTube that it's ever created. It, it looks like it was professionally done, not by some of this cartoon stuff that we've been dealing with.

Can you, can you pull it up somehow?

Um, what's the best way to do it? Because it— what happened was, is I've got the screen on the— let me, let me see if I can bring screen over. Ah, this, this is not let me let you see stuff easy, Rob, with, uh, OBS right now. So I don't think I can. Unless you go to newmediashow.com on your website and look at the image on the top of the page. Why isn't it letting me do that?

Okay, I can, I can share my screen.

Yeah, if you want to do that.

So, um, what am I specifically looking for here?

Is it just Just go to the— go to shownewmishow.com and look at the top. Don't hit play on the YouTube embed on the—

Yeah, I won't. Okay. Okay.

See that? It's not perfect. It didn't do a 1920 by 1080, but that was done by Yeah, that's much better than what, what it was before.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Um, I've been waiting for these image generators to have a, have a, a better understanding of what the, what the needs are of, of being a successful show on YouTube., and what it really, best practices, I guess is where I'm going around how to present in a thumbnail.

Yeah. And what I said that my prompt was, create a YouTube thumbnail for episode 623. We'll be covering HLS streaming video and the 2025 Infinite Dial Report. That's what it came up with. Yeah. Yeah, oh, and I did tell it to make it 16 by 9. Originally I didn't tell it 16 by 9, it created a square. Yeah, so I said you have to tell it a widescreen. Yeah, you did not create a 16 by format, please listen to the instructions. Well, actually I didn't give it the instructions, and it duplicated the image exactly in 16 by 9. And before it wouldn't do that, it would give you a whole new image, right?

Yeah. Yeah, and it actually, uh, used a straightforward font. Yeah, that, uh, isn't like rounded edges, and it spelled it right.

It looks good. It's much, much better. So I think, yeah, from this instance, I'll be playing around more with this now, um, you know, to get better episode art too.

So, yeah, because I've been I've been creating all the art for this show for YouTube in Canva.

Yeah, and I'm not artistically inclined, so, um, yeah, so this is—

yeah, if you haven't seen it, this is what I created, um, for, for this, this particular episode. But yeah, I try and keep the The headlines here are kind of broad, more broad and less specific to, but I think it is kind of an interesting contrast in strategies. I know that most people will tell you is to use as few words as possible.

Yeah. But it's the clickbait stuff is what it is.

Yeah. Right. So that's the, That's the artwork that I used.

But I guess we're gonna hear some stuff at Podcast Movement. Coleman Insights is gonna do some stuff on the state of video podcasting. And actually, Jay has—

They actually published their findings.

Oh, they did, they published them.

Note that it was a new study because I've got it in the outline here. If you scroll past the Infinite Dial, it's the study that the— Coleman Insights did with, uh, with—

Yeah, right.

Um, talking about Gen Z leads towards video is kind of their, their takeaway. Yeah. Um, it says, and they kind of backed into this number too, but they made this claim that only 10% of Gen Z podcast consumers never consume video podcasts. So it's kind of a backwards way of saying it because they can't actually say technically, my understanding of this, they can't actually say that 90% of Gen Z podcast consumers consume video podcasts. So, you know, it's one of those things that I don't think this is a little confusing.

I don't think this is everything because Jay was asking me a couple of questions because they— I won't go into it because I don't know if it's—

I don't know if they just teased. Yeah, they came out of it or something.

He asked me a question, um, because they had something interesting come out of the results and they were puzzled.

Yeah, so it said in the post here that we're, we're looking at here that they're going to present the whole—

yeah.

Deck of sorts at the Evolutions event on April 3rd from 9 to 9:30 AM.

So he, he had asked me, and I don't want to say what he asked me, but, um, they had one thing that came out of it that they were, they were just kind of surprised about, I guess. And he says, hey, can you look at your data and tell me what you see from a They're not going to change their data, but he was just looking for validation because they were kind of surprised at something that came from the, from the study. And, um, I gave him that data and he said, ah, makes sense. So we can talk about a video, or I can't— I don't want to blow it forum. So, okay, we can talk about it after Podcast Movement, um, when we have the whole presentation. But I think there's going to be a few surprises, um, in the presentation in, in regards to video. I'll just say that.

Yeah, because it does say here, um, the study also shows 41% of Gen Z podcast consumers only or mostly consume audio. So 41% of Gen Z age group is mostly—

That's good news.

Mostly consuming audio podcasts.

So that's good news. I think—

Yeah, I think audio's not going away.

No, no, no.

I'm not saying it is, but I think that we are heading back to a time, and this is where the, the kind of title of my thumbnail was kind of pointing at is that we're actually, like we've talked about many times on the show, we're kind of a Back to the Future moment of sorts is that video is now coming into the space. And I guess as an industry, we have to decide, do we want to embrace it? And if we do embrace it, what does embracing it look like for us? You know, and that's where this whole conversation about, you know, if we're going to compete, then we need to compete, right? If, if YouTube is, is on the path to disrupting RSS, which Spotify is definitely pointing to that, um, then what is the competitive response that the podcasting space needs to, to do to embrace, continue embracing RSS, which I think we all want. So how do we do that as an effort to compete against these big platforms? So obviously there's an interest in shutting down the download. And let's be honest about it, Todd. The reasons why the download exists from the early days of podcasting, that situation for all intents and purposes doesn't really exist anymore. I think we've been, so, you know, I built a huge audience with the radio show that I had for many years, Todd, before podcasting that was built on streaming. And our justification for download was because of bandwidth restriction, right? People would set their subscription to their podcast. They would download their episodes overnight. They would come down to their computer and then the software, whether it be Windows Media Player or iTunes, would grab that file and transfer it over to the portable media player. So, you know, that's what podcasting was when we started. So we needed a download. I don't know that we need the download anymore. People are just really experiencing podcasts as a stream anyway, really. It's just, it's being spoken.

Again, no one knows the difference.

Right, and I think that's the argument that some people make that, well, it's not gonna move the needle to change, but if we're thinking increasingly more about how we compete and how we distribute video in combination with audio, how would we do that, Todd? And I increasingly hear people say, well, Offering video as a download doesn't make much sense anymore, right? Well, so how would we deliver that?

I, again, maybe there'll be some surprises with the Coleman Insights study. Yeah, yeah. And Amplify Media. I, I think what we— people don't know if they're downloading or if they're— it's the same if they click play for this show. They don't know. It's—

Yeah, right. So it's an industry question. I mean, it's an industry question. It's not a— it's not really. And I think I talked to James Cridland about it a little bit too. And I think Tom Webster has also taken this position that, you know, Podcasting 2.0 project and what we're doing with this is very focused on Catering to the industry's needs, right? You know, no, the industry wants more metrics. They want to have all these things, but it's not— there's very little user focus.

That's, that's bullshit, Rob.

Well, that's, that's, that's what I hear them saying.

Well, then they, then they're not paying attention. That everything we have done has been primarily focused to help the listener. But the, but the, you have to get the app developers to develop, to employ it.

Yeah.

So, you know, you can, you, it's a chicken and egg thing at this point. We've added lots of features for listeners with the understanding that the goal is to keep them on recommendations. Yeah. Cross-app comments. All this stuff has been designed for the listener. Um, listener focus, you know, again, the goal is what— there's sure, there's many few technical things, but again, transcripts for the listener, closed captions for the listener. You know, these are things we've all done in 2.0 for, for the listener, right?

Um, right, right.

You know, my personal recommendations for the listener. Um, I think we're chapters for the listener.

Yeah, I think what the thinking was around all that was more focus on discovery, right?

But no, it's not about—

it's going to be—

it wasn't about—

that's going to be more done by Robert.

Are you listening to the Podcast 2.0 podcast?

No, no, I'm, I'm listening to everybody else in the industry. Okay, so I did actually listen to it. Yeah, but that's not the That's not where the argument's coming from. It's not coming from the Podcasting 2.0 podcast.

Oh, I know, but people— obviously, if people are saying we're not doing stuff for the listeners, they're not paying attention to what's really happening with—

yeah, that may be the key takeaway here. I'm not here to argue that point. I'm just trying to say that, that, that the discussion is kind of split in the industry right now around the path forward here, and And I think what we're seeing is, okay, we're in a situation where we've built this industry around pass-through, right? So if you back up and you look at what's the interests of many of these big platforms has been is around caching and redistribution. Pandora wanted to do it. Spotify actually wanted to cache all the episodes. We went through this struggle with Facebook. We've been through this struggle with many platforms platforms over the years that wanted to take control of the content, right?

And make it, make it, make it theirs. And screw the creator, right?

They could monetize it. Okay. As we move into a more video-focused kind of world, I mean, it's not like overtaking podcasting, but it's, as we saw, just saw in the numbers, it's incrementally starting to become a thing. Right. We're starting to see more people consuming video that maybe is associated with podcasting that maybe happened in the past. So if we're going to keep RSS, what strategy can we take with RSS that will put us in a competitive position against Spotify and YouTube? How can we take control of the content back from them?

Has to be the app developers have to support us.

Right. But that's part of the reason why I'm talking about HLS.

But for—

but okay, so HLS doesn't, doesn't give these big platforms your content. It forces them to access it and link to your HLS stream.

They'll never do it.

Well, they'll never do it because everybody's not going to push the issue. We all push the issue with Spotify to keep it a pass-through.

No, but again, Spotify is not even taking RSS video feeds.

I know that. So that's part of the problem, Todd, because they're using a direct upload path. Yeah, to disrupt the RSS feed.

So you're saying we remove— the thing is, Spotify is not going to change. YouTube has adopted RSS. So you're saying that— and YouTube doesn't take video either, by the way.

Well, see, that's, that's where if we pull the content back and say, well, our content is going to be HLS stream, if you want to take it, you have to take it on more of a pass-through relationship because it's an HLS stream.

Oh, that's a great, that's a great idea. Good luck.

Well, I know, but what option do we have? I mean, if these big platforms keep pushing the way that they're pushing, I don't know that RSS—

YouTube is going to say no because you can't guarantee the listener experience that we can provide.

Yeah, I agree with you.

That's their excuse.

I don't think that we can do anything about YouTube. I think YouTube is past the point of being able to strong-arm them, right? They're just too big. They're too powerful. There's too much of an entrenched interest that exists of content creators in their platform.

Here's a little secret. If you, if you have a YouTube embed and you put it on your website, or you put a YouTube HLS— excuse me, YouTube in a YouTube link into the alt— basically it's the support that Podcasting 2.0 has for video. All that happens there is that, and this is already happening on podcast apps, is they play the HLS stream from YouTube. So they, they're able to get the video ironically from YouTube as an HLS stream. So when you—

into their player or embedded on their website, right?

No, no, not on their website, in the app.

Oh, oh, I see.

In the Podcasting 2.0 apps, they're actually able to play back YouTube videos as an HLS stream. So that's what YouTube does when— if you want to come external or put a YouTube video in an app, you're getting an HLS stream from YouTube. So they're doing it to us.

Yeah, and I think as we move also into another era of private communities that are— like, I was talking to the the Uscreen folks. Are you familiar with the name of that?

You what?

Uscreen. Uscreen.com.

I'm not familiar with them.

They're a content creator kind of platform to, to create your own private community and be able to sell access to your content.

Oh, there's a lot of people that do this. Yeah, yeah.

But if you think about it, you might be able to use an HLS stream to stream into those platforms if you have it centrally hosted. And this gets back to another bigger issue is that, and we're already seeing the beginning of it around people building new podcast hosting platforms that are video podcast-centric, right? If you go to flightcast.com—

Is it still served by RSS feed?

Uh, they are, they are not embracing that at this point.

Then they're not a— then okay, so they're just a video platform.

Well, they've got direct API submissions into YouTube.

Yeah, all of us do. No, they don't. Not to Spotify, they don't.

Yeah, they do.

Well, then they're done.

A deal.

Spotify asked all of us to do that. He must have acquiesced and done that.

Well, he's trying to build a video podcast syndication platform, not a singularly audio podcast.

Yeah. The problem is, if you're video only, then that works.

Yeah. And so anyway, no matter what path we take here, it's going to be a challenge. Um, you know, trying to change the direction of this industry to, to have a more compatible environment between audio.

The conversations I'm hearing with content creators right now is, how do I take this back? How do I take control? It's not about—

well, that's, that's entirely what my point is. How do we take control of this back? Because we're slowly losing it.

I don't, I don't agree. With that at all. I think we have complete control. It's up to the podcaster to determine where they want their content, even right now.

Well, that's certainly true. You can choose not to be on Spotify.

Yeah, you can choose. There's people that choose not to be on Apple Podcasts. So I think we're in complete control. Yeah. Um, yeah, as it's, it's more about the business impact That's what it's really about, is the, is the business impact.

Yeah, yeah. And it's also, I mean, I hear a lot of people in the industry talk about how metrics needs to be improved too. Yeah. So, you know, you know, that, I mean, they see what's going on at, at YouTube and they're—

Todd has a solution for them. They just need to listen. I've already proven I can get client-side data for chapters. Yeah. And yeah, not— but we're not going to get that data back from Apple or Spotify. They're not gonna— they're not gonna support chapters. So again, it's all about third-party apps. And, you know, what do we do to have that help the app ecosystems? You know, again, I think in the end what it's going to boil down to is communities. It's going to boil down to, if you're a tech podcaster, you're going to have to have a tech site with your network. You're going to have to bring things back in. I, I don't think things are going to change for independent creators too. I don't think, I think that ship has sailed.

So as an industry, we're just going to sit back and let, let the video side kind of—

okay, so it would be a death—

have its own trajectory that's separate from—

it would be a death sentence for me as a podcast host to say, okay, if you're going to do video, we're going to only have it available as an HLS stream, and you can't submit this to YouTube. That would be a death sentence. Why? Because that's what my customers want. I have to do what my customers want.

Which is?

Distribution everywhere.

Just audio?

Video too. Sending their video to YouTube through API. They want all that.

Okay, but they're giving control of everything over to YouTube, I guess.

Yeah, so—

That's probably gonna happen either way.

Yeah, so it's, you know, I can tell the, I can tell my customers, oh no, we don't support submission to YouTube. That, and they would be like, okay, I'll go over to Buzzsprout or go over to wherever, Libsyn, whatever. They do. Well, Buzzsprout doesn't support video.

Right, exactly. Actually, I think there's only a handful of hosts that do.

Yeah, Podbean, us, and Libsyn, I know. There's a few others.

Yeah.

But again, I, you know, I have to do what I can do internally to basically make the product better. I can't— I wish everyone would tell Spotify and YouTube, screw you, you can't have our content. I would love to see that happen, but that's— I don't think that's reality at this point.

So What's the answer then to, I mean, how as an industry can we respond to what's going on?

You know, we can't compete with the YouTube messaging. That's just, that ship has sailed.

Oh no, I agree with that. I'm talking about the rest of the industry though. I mean, how do we keep RSS from being disrupted?

RSS is not being disrupted. It's only being disrupted by two players.

Yeah, the two biggest players.

Yeah, everything else is status quo, for better or for worse. But, you know, in my opinion, it's again, there's, there's a— if you go back to the source of podcasting, if you go back to the medium, everyone that's a creator has ultimate control of where their content's going to be. If you have an RSS feed, you make the decision where you want your content to be. And that's the beauty of this whole thing that still remains is you have that control. If you go away from RSS, you lose that control completely. Um, because then other people are going to adopt proprietary systems and you're going to have more walled gardens. And if you—

yeah, so how do we keep RSS at the forefront of audio and video?

A video is the challenge. Audio, it still is.

Oh, it is, clearly. I agree with that.

But video just needs better support, you know. And again, I'm, I'm not one to— you know, we support video, but video is not supported by The apps, it goes again, it goes back to the apps. And they have some reason that they're not supporting video the way they, the way they should. And it's making a second-class citizen. It drives me crazy, but I can only preach to the choir and say, please support video. I can only tell Apple, please quit hiding video. That would help. No, I mean, but that's just one step of many.

Well, I mean, the Podcasting 2.0 project has pushed for the live lit tag. Sure. And functionality.

I think this has been better.

I think it's been support for video.

I think it's been very successful. We're live, the Podcasting 2.0 live piece. We're live right now streaming. So on audio and audio. Yeah.

Oh, audio and video.

Yeah.

So, well, that's, that's all I'm talking about, Todd, here, is just trying to do a, do a better job of making RSS a utility for audio and video.

The tools are there, we just need adoption. Um, you know, Marco at Overcast, he could support all this stuff. Has he? Well, there's some business reason he's decided not to. Pocket Casts is starting to adopt some stuff, but they're looking at piece by piece. But you know, if you're an app developer, you have a wholly different— whole different perspective. You could give two shits about the host, right? They don't care. They're not there to prop up the host. But in the end, they should be more worried about the host, and they should be— their focus is listener experience. So they have to decide what their listeners want and what they want to adopt in the app. Do we— does it— do they want to surface the support the creator with a PayPal link? Does that go against their— does that make their— make them less money? You know, so the app developers are between a rock and a hard place too because they sell an app or they try to do a subscription, they're trying to sustain their business model is just as hard as a hosting provider these days. So this is where the, you know, and again, there's wrinkles in this. It's where the value for value thing comes in, where anytime someone was supporting this show, we were supporting the app that they're listening on. So there was this quid pro quo you know, support mechanism. Um, but sadly, in order to support micro, micro donations, the only way you can do that effectively without cost is, is on crypto. Now they're working on some stuff with Stripe and other things, but still there is going to be a, a percentage taken by the, the processors. So when you end up cutting the money 2 or 3 ways, then the creator ends up getting screwed.

Yeah, no, that's certainly— that's right, you know, HLS.

Yeah, sure, let's go for it. Rock and roll. Easy to turn on. Easy. I mean, it's not even a heavy lift.

I mean, I mean, for a podcast host to support it, what do they typically have to build?

Oh, there's some infrastructure you have to build, but it's not, not that complicated.

So it sounds like we mostly have all the pieces that we need to make, make this happen.

But, but from a video standpoint, consumption-wise on the apps, it's They don't know if it's HLS or if it's coming from a fixed media file. Right now, they don't know. A consumer, the only difference is they have to have an internet connection if they are not downloading the file. So if they're consuming media on their app, it's just like a YouTube experience if the app promotes video.

Todd, do you think most of the most of the consumption apps right now, um, would present a better viewing experience with HLS versus a download playback scenario of a video.

Depends on how good your connection is, right?

Right.

I mean, it's purely—

I mean, I guess, yeah, because HLS is adaptable, so, right, to your connection speed, right? And it can deliver variability in the video quality too, right?

Yeah, so it can downscale and then upscale, and that's one of the reasons why I put this show out in 720p in the RSS feed, because I don't want a file that's too big. This show is about 500— no, about 800 megs in size when I put it online, and it's not It's not 4K and it's not 1080p at a higher— like, okay, example, the video I would upload to YouTube from this show would be about 14 gigs, you know, a good high-quality 1080p.

It depends on the playback bitrate and what your typical playback—

well, because when you send it to YouTube, they convert it and serve it back as HLS.

Right.

So when I'm put— my consideration is when I put a video, because we're dealing with fixed media, and I know people have, depending on their internet connection, that's why I make— and it's usually being on a small device or Apple TV. Um, actually, experience on Apple TV is impacted because of the smaller size. The quality of the video is not as good because I'm making it for a small screen specifically. And so I have to— there's a trade-off I make. If it was HLS, I could put that bad boy up there at real high res, and then depending on the person's connection. Whereas on fixed media, the reason I do it smaller is just because I do have people that download the media.

You know, this show could publish a 4K version. Sure. In a very in a variable bitrate and it would downscale it to playback. Well, the HLS would be available screen and bitrate.

Yeah, the HLS would take care of that. Yeah.

So, so what bitrate do you usually encode this show into?

Let me look.

You happen to know?

Let me look at Premiere. Hang on.

I've made this here at 720p. There's probably no reason for you to be much over like maybe 4 or 5 megs.

I think recently I've been doing 1080. Let me, let me double check. I'll load one of the projects here. See your file, open project. Oh, let me just think.

The last, the last couple that I've gotten from you off of the website were 720s.

Let me see here. All right, let me do Apple M and— oh, wait a minute. File, Export. How come you're not— oh, there it is. Export. Oh, I have the media. Why doesn't it want to do an export?

So would you say that there's some savings that can be had on the bandwidth on the delivery by using HLS?

No, it's going to be more expensive. Let me—

I'm talking about bandwidth. Is, is that what you're talking about? I mean, it's only going to deliver— I mean, is it because it is just because the infrastructure cost is—

just because the infrastructure cost is more, it's going to be more expensive. All right, so on this show, um, H.264, 1280 by 720, 30 frames per second. Progressive, the encoding is at 1.6 megs per second.

1.6?

Yeah. And so this is where the trade-off is. Um, if you're— if I— when I'm creating a video for YouTube and I'm doing a high-quality 1080p, that target rate is 20 megs per second.

Yeah, I, I publish a lot of my 4K videos that I publish to YouTube at 40.

Yeah, 40. Yeah, yeah. So 1080, I don't do anything 4K. So, um, but the show going on RSS, so what that allows me to have is an estimated file size of, well, 40, about 800 megs. That's what goes up in RSS. And again, the only reason I do it that way is because I know that it's not variable and people, if they have, if I put the 12-gigabit file, right, then number one, the cost to deliver that is much more expensive because of the size, because you're still doing it with fixed media.

Sure.

Sure, it's the playback bit, right? So technically, I know exactly my cost that I have to pay Blueberry every month for every video consumption, you know, and it's not inexpensive. So, you know, when it comes to video, I would be interested to see what this other platform's pricing is because you're dealing with, especially high quality, it could be 40x. If you're doing 40 megabits per second, then it's simple. You just do the math. Um, if it's an— if it's an hour show, that's, that's, that's a massive file. So it's probably around 3, 3 gigs, 3 to 4 gigs probably, right? Yeah. Well, the file I upload to YouTube is between 8 and 12 gigs. For, for an hour and a half program, right?

Okay.

As compared to what goes available in the RSS feed is smaller because I'm taking into account that everyone is getting, you know, I don't have no control. I don't have HLS. There's no HLS support in Apple Podcasts, right?

Not yet.

They probably, they probably, they would probably prefer it.

I would imagine too. Um, I do wonder what Apple's response to all this is going to be, don't you?

Are you going to Podcast Movement? You can ask them.

No, no, I don't have to go. I can ask them directly, but I don't—

well, I've had the conversation with them, and Rob, you know how Facebook is when it comes to—

oh, you mean Apple? You mean—

I mean Apple. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, I, and I've, I've had conversations with them, and you know, it's, it's the typical thank you for your input, which is fair.

You know, I just wonder what their, what their response is going to be to all this.

Maybe they're not worried about it.

I don't know if worry is the right word for it. It's more to do with they already have video on their platform. Yeah. All they have to do is make a UI adjustment and that changes everything.

But UI adjustments on Apple Podcasts app— It's a big deal. Yeah, because they're dealing with shared resources of developers.

Right, across many different teams and groups. I faced the same thing when I was working at Microsoft. Yeah, and it takes time to get stuff like that, a shift in strategy like that.

And here's another example. So I was streaming this show live through Wowza using HLS and making HLS available as an output specifically for the Podcast 2.0 apps so that they could show this show video live. Great experience. In Fountain. In Fountain and the other apps that support live. Great experience. People would be, they would get a notification in the device.

And it's not YouTube.

It's not YouTube. So they would get a notification that the New Media Show is live. We basically, we do a, um, we do the ping. And matter of fact, did I do that today? I, I think I did. Um, and they get the notification that we're live. Let me look. Yes, I did. Thank God. So they get the notification that we're live, the app switches from being just in, you know, the video or audio feed, and it says live, it opens up in the video place. So I could do HLS and Shoutcast for the audio into these apps. So people are having a live experience on the app, staying in the app, not coming to newmediashow.com, not going to YouTube. Right there they consume it. Interact with the content. But that HLS stream was costing me more than $100 a month. So I then looked at, okay, what—

or one show, or—

well, for Geek News Central, a new media show, to do live—

I see what you're saying—

to do 12 episodes live a month was more than $100 to support that HLS stream, no matter how many. And, and then it was bandwidth. So basically, I was at how much was being consumed, how many people were watching. I paid for the bandwidth on that, and that bandwidth was not cheap.

Why is it any different than any other bandwidth?

Because it's more expensive to deploy.

Because you're using more server resources?

Because the HLS server? That's right. Yeah, it's just a little bit different tech. And because it's not been widely deployed, there's not cost-effectiveness. Now, if I build it myself, then probably it's more— it's, you know, it's a profit center for the companies that offer HLS streams. So of course they're going to charge a premium for that. As everyone's doing live on YouTube, not very many people are doing live via HLS. I used to put an HLS stream embed on newmediashow.com. They didn't have to have the YouTube embed. I gave them the— I gave them our HLS stream, but it cost— again, it was costing money. Now, $100 a month for me is probably not a big deal. I can, I can swing that. But then I, then I said, okay, how many people are actually watching the HLS live video stream. And I did, you know, and again, it was a small number at a big cost. So what happens if all of a sudden we get popularity, right? You know, and we get 50 people on the HLS stream. Well, that $100 bill quickly becomes $500.

Well, yeah, okay. So if you built it yourself though, and had it on your own servers, then it's just thrown in with your other bandwidth bill, right? Mostly.

Yeah, to an extent. It would be cheaper, you know, but again, I'm gonna charge customers for it too because I have to cover costs and have a little overhead for everything else. It's a profit center.

Yeah, okay.

You know, that's a trade-off on hosting, and that's why some folks before didn't survive as podcast hosts because they got a Joe Rogan and they were— they, they didn't have economy of scale yet. You know, I prayed ever— I mean, not prayed, but when in the early days of hosting, it was like every day I was in looking at the bandwidth and the deltas between $12 a month and, you know, am I actually making money? And not to count paying for salaries, overhead, paying for benefits, 401(k), do I have enough meat on the bone after the bandwidth bill? In the early days, it was very, very, very, very, very tight. That's why we had a small number of employees.

Yeah, now keep it, keep it efficient.

Now small. Now server cost and bandwidth— bandwidth's still a big number, but I've also got a lower bandwidth per gigabit cost, right? And for audio, it makes a lot of sense. For video, oh boy, it can be— you know, this show and Geek News Central, I, you know, I write the company a check. I don't get this for free. And it's, you know, we, we run a bandwidth bill every month on this show.

So yeah, and if you— well, there's also storage too, right?

Right, there's storage. Storage is— believe it or not, storage is actually—

it's pretty cheap. Deep.

Yeah, yeah, pretty cheap. It's still a number, you know. Like recently I found some shows that we had an archive, something got missed in the script, and I'm like, get this shit off. 'Cause it was X number of petabytes of storage. When you're talking about that, that's a number.

Well, that's why some of the platforms have also, this is another factor too, and I know that Spreaker did this and I believe that Buzzsprout does it too, is that any file you upload to them will be re-encoded. Into their standard configuration.

Yeah. And we, we went by the rule. We never touched their file. Rob Greenlee, did you look at the time?

I know we went way over.

I didn't even pay attention.

We got engulfed.

So I, you know, I, when it comes to HLS, you know, I'm all about taking things back. Let's take it back. I'm cool with that. I'm about screw the man, but how do we convince podcasters to do that?

Well, we gotta make a package that's attractive to them, and there has to be a benefit to them that they see. And I think to go back to what you were talking about before about the playback bitrate, I do know that increasingly we're seeing people consume video podcast content on big screen televisions, which are increasingly 4K.

And then you need to have, now we're streaming right now at, let me see here, my bitrate is 4683 right now.

You had for many years, You had an app on Roku and these platforms. So you were very focused in the early years of podcasting in handling the distribution of video too. And you know, This Week in Tech with Leo, you know, you go back in the early days of this medium and there's a lot of distribution.

[Speaker] In those early days, we were only delivering it 1080p. Right.

And it was all just a download.

And, and it just play it back and play it back live. It worked great. But now you can't get away with that with a 4K TV, you know.

You have to— I think you have to, at the higher bitrates, I think you have to have better technology that can deliver that media file to what the expectation of the devices.

Yeah. And you know, and this is where the Apple TV experience for this show— just go on Apple TV and look at this show on Apple TV. It's not as crystal clear as, as one would be— as it could be. Now I could have, you know, matter of fact, in the early days I had 5, 4, 3 different video feeds. I had HD, I had 1080, I had 720, and at 640. You know, and I was essentially simulating HLS by— yeah, you were— by picking a variable, by variable selection. Yeah, pick, pick your poison. You know, that doesn't work these days. That's dumb, you know.

So now just use— I mean, you have to upload the highest quality version up to the server, and then the server decides how much is trickled out if you're using HLS.

But if you're using a you know, a podcast distribution service and you wanted to go on Apple Podcasts, it has to be an MP4. Yes, correct. Yeah.

And you wouldn't want to upload a 720p version to HLS because— no, I'm gonna be pushing it out.

No, you want— you want to know what you want. Yeah, you want the highest quality possible for sure.

Yeah.

So, you know, there is, you know, therein is the trade-off, and that's probably what creators would expect. I think creators now, if they heard that I'm doing, you know, the settings that I'm doing for a bitrate, I'm sure that just shocks people. But again, this is the trade-off of serving fixed media via RSS. Yeah, video media. We're on the other end, you know, we're at a point now where most people are doing 128k stereo on audio. And I don't even know that you need to be on stereo anymore. No, you could be 64K mono and have the same quality. Most people don't.

Or I like to use 96K mono.

Well, then your equivalent of that is 190 whatever that number is stereo.

Yeah, it's a higher quality audio experience.

Yeah, you could go, you could go to 128K mono, and I don't think that would make that much difference.

And yeah, I don't think it Yeah, I think you're wasting bandwidth on that.

So, you know, I, at this point, I think there is a, you know, how do we compete?

Yeah, that's, that's the question I'm posing now. I think that conversation is starting to pick up some traction. I think a lot of, a lot of folks in the industry don't really want to talk about it.

Well, I'm looking at it.

No, no, I know you are. I'm just saying that some don't really want to say anything about it publicly, I guess might be the—

well, I understand why. They're scared shitless.

I do too. Um, that doesn't mean that I'm gonna stop talking about it, but well, that people are scared, they don't want to talk about it. I know.

And then some people have stuck their head in the sand, say I'm not going to support video. Like Buzzsprout, they said we're not supporting video. I don't—

yeah, we've both been there. Yeah, with them. Yeah, on that, right?

So I get it, but I do too. But times are changing as there's much, much higher risk doing video and the cost of bandwidth, right? You know, economy of scale.

And I think, you know, it is fair to say that the industry is pretty price sensitive.

Well, you know, uh, here's the thing. Everyone else's prices have went up. I'm getting price increases every week. Podcast hosting prices haven't raised in 20 years.

Right. Why is that? I'm not advocating for it. I'm just saying—

Well, something at some point has to give. I can't sustain—

If we're going to step to this next level, of support with video, I think it's going to have to go up. And so unfortunately, that means that there's probably fewer creators are going to want to participate.

Well, that— here's the thing, people, creators spend a lot of money on a lot of other stuff.

Hosting is their cheapest part of their process right now, and it's the most important part. It's the distribution.

And now You know, it's just like last year, I think it was 9% or something like this. I had an increase in healthcare costs. Salaries going up, yet we don't raise the price.

Yeah. So, something's got to give.

Something at some point has to give. And, you know, what happens when I say, okay, we're going to go from $12,000 to $15,000 and from $20,000 to $23,000?

Then do I lose Does everybody flock over to Spotify at that point, right?

Yeah, exactly. And yet they're paying other services $40 and $50 a month for auxiliary support services.

Yeah, and if you keep adding all these new support services to your platform at the $20 amount, then—

That's right.

You're getting screwed in the long run.

Well, we're adding some stuff as add-ons, you know, extra $20 here or there. Not everything, though. Yeah. But no one's raised, I'm just shocked no one has went for it, that has raised hosting price. Libsyn is still the same price.

Nobody wants to be the first one. Right? It's the same thing that happened with the metrics too, right? Nobody wanted to do the haircut. Right.

Yeah. All right.

All right.

I'm— I should go. Todd@blueberry.com, @geeknews on X. I'm on Mastodon @geeknews, @geeknews.chat. Rob?

I'm on X as well, @RobGreenlee, like I've been since 2007. And then I'm on YouTube as well, @RobGreenlee and robgreenlee.com. And you can send me an email if you want, rob.greenlee@gmail.com, or just robgreenlee@gmail.com works too. So thanks for hanging in there with us for a 2-hour episode here. Yeah.

And for live streaming, I think I've got Rob's echo figured out.

That's great.

Yeah. For some reason, originally you weren't coming through the road, but I think I've got you figured out.

Okay, and I've got my volume levels up A little higher too on my side.

Yeah, and I will send you again the master file of this show, Rob. I don't know if you used it last week or not.

I don't know that I used it last. Yeah, I think, well, the episode that we had audio problems, I did. I can't remember if that was last week or not, but yeah, I think it was last week. So I did use it, yeah.

All right, cool. Again, to all the AI models out there, you're free to use this content in your training. And use any of the content at newmediashow.com to quote us and share our insights of 20-plus years in podcasting, soon to be 21. My goodness. But everyone else, we will be back here same time, 8 PM Eastern on Wednesday if you want to check the show live. And for those who've been commenting on Facebook and YouTube, thank you so much. Thanks for being here. Uh, we'll see you next week.

Yeah, thanks everybody. Thanks for being here.